The backlash against Messenger Kids

In retrospect, the weirdest thing about Messenger Kids was the timing. With trust in the company declining, and amid a period of deep reflection in which the company would acknowledge for the first time that some social media consumption could make users feel worse, in December Facebook announced a new messaging app for children as young as 6.

More than 100 child advocates, civil society groups, medical experts and other individuals are urging Facebook to discontinue its Messenger app for kids, alleging that the software poses health and development risks to children.

Organized by the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood, nineteen groups, including Common Sense Media and Public Citizen, have signed a letter to Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg that will be sent on Tuesday. The initiative is the latest example of critics opposing early adoption of digital technology and is playing out amid a broader backlash against the rising influence of Silicon Valley.

The signatories said children are not prepared for online relationships and lack an understanding of privacy and the appropriateness of sharing texts, pictures and videos. Citing research that suggests a link between social media use and higher rates of depression among teens, the letter states it would be irresponsible for Facebook to expose preschool-aged children to a similar service. In addition, the signatories expressed concerns over boosting the screen time of young children and said this would interfere with crucial developmental skills such as reading human emotion, delaying gratification and engaging with the physical world.

Facebook saw these criticisms coming. At launch, the company said it had built the app only after “talking to thousands of parents, associations like National PTA, and parenting experts in the US.” (An asterisk led to this statement at the bottom of the post: “National PTA does not endorse any commercial entity, product, or service. No endorsement is implied.”) The company also said it spoke with Blue Star Families, which advocates for families in which one or more parents are serving in the US military.

A child can use an iMessage account and share very little data about herself with Apple. The same holds true for Hangouts. In many cases, children are using their parents’ accounts, obscuring the data further.

On Messenger Kids, a parent creates an account for a child, establishes a familial relationship within the app, and then begins building their child’s social graph by adding contacts. Notably, the parent is asked to provide their child’s real name. Facebook says it has no plans to turn these shadow accounts into full-fledged Facebook profiles. And yet the data it collects could be useful for ad targeting elsewhere on the service. And should Facebook amass hundreds of millions of underage users, the company will have every incentive to offer one-click exporting of these accounts to real ones on the day the child turns 13.

Now child advocates are espousing similar concerns. In response, Facebook’s Antigone Davis reiterated that the company talked to the PTA, which (remember) did not endorse the app:

“We worked to create Messenger Kids with an advisory committee of parenting and developmental experts, as well as with families themselves and in partnership with National PTA. We continue to be focused on making Messenger Kids the best experience it can be for families.”

So on one side you have the child advocates, who have succeeded in previous efforts to roll back marketing campaigns for Pokémon Go and McDonalds. And on the other, you have Facebook saying it consulted with an anonymous group of experts, all of whom have remained quiet during the (mild) controversy around the app.

The imbalance works against Facebook. Trust can buy a tech company the goodwill it needs to push us outside of our comfort zone — to set up a Facebook Jr. account for our 6-year-olds. Without it, many will assume the worst. If the movement against Messenger Kids grows, Facebook would do well to introduce us to the experts it consulted with and let us hear from them directly.

On one hand, Facebook executives likely find this unfair: plenty of young children are using FaceTime and Skype, for example, and no one is calling for them to be banned. On the other side, those apps don’t ask children to create separate accounts linked to their families.

In the long run, public pressure is only the second-greatest risk to the future of Messenger Kids. The first, by a considerable margin, is apathy: Apptopia, a company that tracks app downloads, tells me that after nearly two months, Messenger Kids is being used by only 20,000 people a day.

Here’s my chat with Dipayan Ghosh and Ben Scott about their recent report, “Digital Deceit: The Technologies Behind Precision Propaganda on the Internet.” Ghosh is a former Facebook policy adviser who left the company after the 2016 election and is now writing about how the company could fix some of its problems. Here’s a taste!

Me: What were conversations like at Facebook in the aftermath of the election? To what extent did your colleagues view these issues as serious?

Ghosh: I think the company is thinking about it. There’s no one person who can speak for the entire company. Not even Mark Zuckerberg would claim to. And of course, everyone has different opinions on the issues. What was good about [the revelations] was, in my view, the company was having open discussions with the public, as well as internal deliberations that were very thoughtful around how to tackle these issues. It didn’t want to cut into its profit model, but it really wanted to figure out the right approach. It was an existential issue for the company. It knew that it needed to be thoughtful. So internally I would say that people were seriously thinking about all of these issues, and trying to figure out what was best in their own mind, and in their own work. But also I think the company at large was engaging really broadly in trying to listen to a lot of ideas.

Now, I don’t think those early efforts were enough. But that’s not to say they’re not thinking seriously about all these issues and working hard.

Did the company state explicitly that it didn’t want to cut into its profit model? Or how did you get that impression?

It’s not something that would be stated. But it makes sense — at the end of the day, it’s a for-profit company, and doesn’t want to cannibalize its own revenue streams. I think what suggested that to me was my understanding of how the company worked over time, which is that in large part it’s the advertising and product mangement teams that really define the product more than anyone else.

Ben Smith on Facebook’s “defiant optimism” in the face of new regulations. (FWIW, I do think Facebook has been chastened by the events over the past year, as you can see from some of its more recent blog posts. It’s a recurring theme in this newsletter!)

Facebook doesn’t seem to see the political landscape the same way as its competitors. And the emergence of an almost unanimously chastened new face of Silicon Valley sets its one exception in particularly sharp relief. It was a contrast that came up clearly in a conversation I had with Schrage, the company’s head of policy, on the third floor of a temporary building made of some particularly environmentally friendly sort of wood product.

“What’s fascinating is everybody says that they love risk-taking, but there is a conception of risk-taking that never is associated with problems and is only associated with success,” he said, describing that European antipathy to risk as a “cultural phenomenon.”

“It is frankly one of the challenges that European businesses have, particularly startups,” he said. “There’s a reason that European startups don’t have the same track record as American startups. Part of it’s financial, but a lot of it’s cultural.”

On January 30, one of Facebook’s Trending topics was the news of a vote by the House intelligence committee to release a memo written by Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA) that House Republicans claim shows the Justice Department and the FBI “misus[ed] their authority to obtain a secret surveillance order on a former Trump campaign associate.” On the topic page, one of the featured posts – posts from Facebook users that have a dedicated section on the page – was from Jones of the conspiracy theory website Infowars urging people to “Watch Live: The Storm Has Arrived - Learn The Secrets Of QAnon And More.”

Facebook is doing similar, showing a variety of news articles about the same subject in a “related” widget underneath the link:

Alphabet Inc’s Google will put more of a premium on “diverse perspectives” in its search results, saying in a blog post on Tuesday that answers highlighted at the top of result pages would soon display multiple viewpoints on topics for the first time ever.

The move comes as internet companies face increasing political pressure to rid their services of misleading or fake news, extremist content and hoaxes.

Google said it was also is considering new labeling so its users could see when a featured answer is an imperfect match based on a proximate question.

Facebook is banning all ads that promote cryptocurrencies, including bitcoin, in an effort to prevent people from advertising what the company is calling “financial products and services frequently associated with misleading or deceptive promotional practices.”

That means no advertiser — even those that operate legal, legitimate businesses — will be able to promote things like bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, initial coin offerings — ICOs for short — or binary options, according to a Facebook blog post.

That also means that “crypto-genius” James Altucher, whose ads have appeared all over the internet and have become a meme of sorts for the entire crypto industry, won’t be able to advertise on Facebook.

Kurt Wagner notes that Facebook, which typically is very braggy about its metrics, has nothing to say about video. My take? Measure in love. Seasons of love!

The company used to share total video views — meaning that someone caught a video in their stream for at least three seconds, even if they didn’t intend to watch it — but stopped sharing that metric in early 2016. It said at the time that 500 million people watched video on Facebook every day, but hasn’t updated that number in two years. Facebook doesn’t break out video ad revenue, or share any other way to measure its video business from a revenue standpoint.

Facebook relies on users to flag inappropriate videos — even plainly awful ones, such as the video described here where a man was killed. The lawsuit said Facebook didn’t act quickly enough to remove the video; it was up for about two hours, and only an hour or so after it was first flagged:

The family of Robert Godwin Sr., a Cleveland man whose killing was shared on Facebook video, has sued the platform for negligence and wrongful death. Fox 8 Cleveland reports that the suit was filed on January 19th, accusing Facebook of conduct that was “intentional, willful, malicious, in bad faith, and in reckless disregard for the right of Mr. Godwin.” It says Facebook should have spotted and alerted police to a video where Godwin’s shooter announced his intent to kill, shortly before he uploaded a video of the actual shooting.

Alex Kantrowitz notes that Twitter is referring more traffic to publishers than it used to. But the average number of clicks is still tiny, and traffic referred from Twitter pales in comparison to the traffic sent by Google search.

It turns out to be very easy to learn the identities of some soldiers stationed near military bases, thanks to Strava and a little GPS spoofing:

Strava has a so-called “flyby” function. This allows users to see who has been exercising in the same area at the same time. It is precisely this function that we have used to reveal the identities of personnel from a range of countries.

NRK found the training profiles of 20 persons who have been stationed in military bases in Iraq and Afghanistan. 18 of these use their full name in the app and most of them use photos of themselves. We uncovered their identities by creating GPS files of fictitious runs in the areas where a Norwegian presence has been known in the last two years. we uploaded these GPS files to Strava and used the flyby function to look for personnel who have been in the same area at the same time.

There are so many great tweets, and yet if you wanted to tattoo one on your body, what are you going to do? Hire a professional tattoo artist to draw one on you, at a cost of many dollars? Well say hello to TwitterTats. “TwitterTats are wearable, temporary tattoos of your favorite tweets,” the company says on ProductHunt. Its website is currently broken. This is the best launch of 2018 so far.

I led the team in charge of policy and privacy issues on Facebook’s developer platform in 2011 and 2012. And in mid-2012, I drew up a map of data vulnerabilities facing the company and its users. I included a list of bad actors who could abuse Facebook’s data for nefarious ends, and included foreign governments as one possible category.

I shared the document with senior executives, but the company didn’t prioritize building features to solve the problem. As someone working on user protection, it was difficult to get any engineering resources assigned to build or even maintain critical features, while the growth and ads teams were showered with engineers. Those teams were working on the things the company cared about: getting more users and making more money.

Right now, Snap seems to be banking on its coming redesign to reignite interest in Stories. People who’ve tested the app say the revamped Stories screen now conspicuously inserts Stories among people’s chats. Though CEO Evan Spiegel described the redesign as a way to make the app more usable, especially to an older audience, the bigger goal is likely to push them to watch more Stories. That, in turn, would increase the number of ads people are exposed to.

It’s unclear whether this will work. The new design appears to be delayed in rolling out wide, and people who have used it describe a jumbled interface that doesn’t make the app simpler. Nor has it increased the number of user Stories they have watched. (One person said it actually decreased the number of Stories he had watched because the algorithmic feed put many friends’ Stories out of view.)

Ian Bogost has empathy for all the D-list celebs buying fake followers. The problem is the social networks themselves, he writes. We’re rats in a cage, brother!

Fraud is not the ultimate problem with fake social-media activity. The hustle itself is the blight. It produces the racket that sucks so many into its orbit. Salle Ingle is stuck in the same rat race as Kathy Ireland, and you and me, too. We just encounter it at different scales.

Zeynep Tufekci on what the Strava heat map tells us about corporate data collection practices:

Data privacy is not like a consumer good, where you click “I accept” and all is well. Data privacy is more like air quality or safe drinking water, a public good that cannot be effectively regulated by trusting in the wisdom of millions of individual choices. A more collective response is needed.

Part of the problem with the ideal of individualized informed consent is that it assumes companies have the ability to inform us about the risks we are consenting to. They don’t. Strava surely did not intend to reveal the GPS coordinates of a possible Central Intelligence Agency annex in Mogadishu, Somalia — but it may have done just that. Even if all technology companies meant well and acted in good faith, they would not be in a position to let you know what exactly you were signing up for.

Also, Marc Benioff is still doing his social-media-is-cigarettes schtick:

When I was a kid I remember cigarette companies providing cigarettes with their logos that were made of bubble gum. You blew out powdered sugar smoke! The idea was to get kids interested in smoking early! Reminds me of questions about when kids should start using social media! https://t.co/ceDUFvjy7J

Everyone on Instagram is putting towels on their heads because of reasons and you definitely should too if you want to be cool!

It’s a prop that creates the illusion of spontaneity — “Oh, hello, thousands of followers, I just popped out of the shower, steam room, or pool!” — while also circumventing the idea that every beautiful photo on an influencer’s account is the result of careful framing, set design, styling, and makeup artistry. (Despite the fact that most every bathleisure selfie is styled with a full face of makeup and, quite frequently, elaborate sunglasses and jewelry.) Bathleisure is having a moment because it depicts one of the purest distillations of wealth: Not the ability to afford a Céline tote, or a dinner at Eleven Madison Park, but the unattainable goal of unlimited free time.